In a computer network, plural computer systems are joined together to exchange information and share resources. Thus, a computer network is a distributed computing environment in which networked computer systems provide users with the capabilities of access to distributed resources, for example, remote files and databases or remote printers, and to distributed processing, for example, where an application is processed on two or more computer systems. In such a distributed computing environment, the components of an application may reside on different machines but work together. For example, each work station in a computer network often provides a user interface and local analysis and data processing, while larger, host computers, for example, a file server or mainframe, may maintain a large set of data files, coordinate access to large databases and perform larger scale data processing.
In a distributed processing environment, each application or process must be able to communicate and exchange information with other applications or processes in the environment. Currently, many inter-application or inter-process exchanges are performed using a messaging technique commonly referred to as message queuing. In message queuing, a first (or “client”) process passes a message to request processing by a second (or “server”) process. The messages are queued at the server process to await handling thereby. In turn, the server process returns an alert when the results are ready. One message oriented middleware product which uses a message queuing messaging technique to enable processes to communicate and exchange information in a distributed computing environment is known as MQ Series messaging software and is commercially available through International Business Machines Corporation of Armonk, N.Y.
Oftentimes, the server process does not actually handle a request received from the client process. Rather, in a number of distributed computing environments, the server process application forwards the request to a separate application, commonly known as a handler application, for handling. While the use of handler applications enables selected functionality to be offloaded the server process application, handler applications may also slow the response time of the server process application, thereby decreasing the number of requests which the server process application may handle in any given time period. It should be readily appreciated that a wide variety of benefits may be derived by increasing the number of requests which can be handled by the server process application in any given time period. Accordingly, it is an object of the invention to enhance the ability of the server process application to handle such requests.